17

OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD, OLD WORLD

The Cuban Missile Crisis erupted on October 22, 1962, and Heinlein spent all his time glued to the radio tuned to CONELRAD, poised to drop everything and get into the shelter on a moment’s notice.

The most remarkable thing about this thirteen-day crisis was that it was a crisis at all. All through the 1950s, after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union had steadily gained the upper hand on the world political stage. By the time of Sputnik in 1957, when it was absolutely certain that the USSR had technical superiority in ballistic missile technology, it began to look to the Heinleins (and to many others, as well) as though there was nothing the “kindly old gentleman” in the White House would not permit the Soviet Union to get away with—a failure of national nerve on a scale that could wipe America, and with it Western liberal ideas, off the planet forever.1

In 1959, the weak and corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on the island of Cuba, ninety miles south of Florida, fell to Communist forces led by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. In 1960, the Castro government nationalized all foreign-owned property. The new Kennedy government responded with an economic blockade of Cuba, embargoing imports of Cuban sugar (the island’s principal cash crop) and fine Havana cigars.2 Cuba’s huge tourism and casino industry also dried up. Overnight, Cuba went from a marginally prosperous nation to one of the poorest countries on Earth. An attempt to retake Cuba the following year, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, failed because of logistical bungling. Castro was desperate for economic and military help, to keep his revolution alive. Uncle Nikita (Khrushchev) stepped up—but his aid came with strings.

The Soviet Union had lost its lead in the missile technology race: By 1962, U.S. nuclear missiles could reach all of the USSR, but Soviet land-based missiles could reach only sites in Europe. In April or May 19623 Khrushchev closed a deal to put missiles along the coast of Cuba, to reach cities in the United States. Building of the emplacements began in the summer of 1962.

The crisis was at full boil for a week before President Kennedy made the public announcement. A U-2 reconnaissance overflight had photographed missile emplacement construction sites on October 15, and President Kennedy immediately organized a dozen of his most important advisers into EXCOMM, to work out the U.S. response—a naval quarantine around Cuba, physically preventing delivery of the intermediate-range missiles to the island (there were already nine nuclear missiles on the island and under Cuban military control). President Kennedy’s public announcement of the crisis on October 22, 1962, made it clear that any launch from Cuba would be considered an act of war and demanded removal of all offensive weapons. He stepped up reconnaissance overflights to one every two hours and on October 25 raised U.S. defense readiness to DEFCON 2.

This was, of course, nerve-wracking—but Heinlein found in it reason for long-term hope: the crisis, Heinlein wrote in a record of a telephone call with Lurton Blassingame that day, “reduces the overall prospects of war but makes the chance of any war much more imminent—today, this week, this month.”

On Friday, October 26, Khrushchev offered by private letter to remove the missiles in exchange for a guarantee the United States would not invade Cuba. The next day, Saturday, another letter demanded the United States also remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey.

President Kennedy was prepared to agree to the terms of the first letter—and the second demand was literally nothing: The Jupiter missiles were ineffective in Turkey, and he had ordered them removed as very nearly his first act as president. But the new demand now placed him in the intolerable position of appearing to give in to Soviet blackmail. Also, it was not possible to determine whether this was a serious offer or a feint while buildup went on.

That morning, a U-2 was shot down over Cuba, and the pressure increased from Kennedy’s military advisers for an air strike to destroy emplacements. Saturday evening, President Kennedy decided to pursue a two-pronged strategy: a formal letter to Khrushchev offering to guarantee no invasion of Cuba once the removal of missiles was verified—i.e., accepting the terms of the first letter—while backchannel private assurances were given that the Jupiter missiles would be removed from Turkey, but only on the basis of a secret understanding.

The following day, Sunday, October 28, 1962, Premier Khrushchev announced he would dismantle the Cuban missile installations and return the missiles to the Soviet Union. By November 20, the dismantling was verified, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was formally over. Heinlein wrote to a friend in England:

This crisis has made me really proud of my country and my compatriots for the first time in some years. The crisis and the ultimatum came as a surprise to most civilians. It was a surprise to me, not because I did not know of the missile buildup—I did know—but because I did not think that Mr. Kennedy would ever stand up to the Soviet Union; I had thought that we had saddled ourselves with a Chamberlain.… The all-prevailing attitude was one of calm resolution—and I was proud to be an American.4

But President Kennedy was also building another legacy: The month before the Cuban Missile Crisis, a young Negro man, James Meredith, had attempted to enroll in the University of Mississippi—“Ole Miss”—but was physically restrained from registering by the university and the governor, Ross Barnett. President Kennedy sent in federal marshals to protect Meredith, and on the day the boy enrolled made a live television address on the subject to the American people. While he was speaking, riots erupted on campus and in the nearby town of Oxford. The president ordered the federal marshals to quell the riots, which injured three hundred and killed two before quiet was restored. Along with the “Freedom Riders” bus trip through the South in May 1961, testing enforcement of the recent desegregation rulings of the Supreme Court, Meredith’s enrollment and the Mississippi riots are considered cornerstones of the civil rights movement.

On the very day the removal of Cuban missiles was verified, Executive Order 11063 banned segregation in federally funded housing. A little more than a year earlier, probably in response to the violence in Alabama surrounding the Freedom Rides, the Interstate Commerce Commission had banned segregated facilities for all interstate carriers. It was an uphill struggle against resistance—but there was visible progress, line by line.

And if Khrushchev had his way, all this would be obliterated (the treatment of minorities in the Soviet Union was as extreme as anything anywhere in the world). The progressive liberal values of Western civilization would go up like tissue paper in a nuclear fireball.

Podkayne of Mars began to run in November as a three-part serial in the bimonthly Worlds of If magazine. Judith Merril wrote saying that her marriage was breaking up and asking for a loan to beef up the fallout shelter arrangements she would be sharing with Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight.5 Robert and Ginny would be delighted to help—as a gift, not a loan. They had very poor luck with personal loans, Heinlein explained. With just one exception, not only had the loans never been repaid, but the embarrassment of being in debt to them had led to resentment and to having their friends cut them. They wanted to avoid that if possible—but

If all or most of the adult civilians in the United States emulated your example, it would be worth far more to the country than would another couple of squadrons of ICBMs—Russia would never risk war with us if all of us were equally determined.…

Our political system, our freedom, is rooted in the idea that basic responsibility is lodged in the individual. If we abdicate that personal, individual responsibility, then we abdicate the very notion of freedom—and might as well surrender quietly to the lords of the Kremlin.…

… I know that gifts rankle the recipient, too, and I fully expect that you will not like us quite as well in the future as you do now, if you accept it. But gifts do not rankle as much as loans, as the matter is over and done with. If you are willing to take it as a gift, then I expect you to be honest with us, with no mental reservations about how you will repay it someday …

They were doing well enough to afford the gift: Stranger in a Strange Land was still selling at high levels for a two-year-old book6—both in hardcover and in paperback.7 Heinlein went on, reinforcing the point:

It must be a clean transaction; all finished, with no emotional hangover, no feeling in the back of your mind that it is “really just a loan.” Nor even a feeling that you “ought” to feel gratitude. I am sufficiently cynical that I do not believe that more than a very small minority of the human race is capable of this most unusual emotion. If you are sufficiently eccentric that you are capable of feeling gratitude, try to keep the feeling to yourself and, with luck, it will go away and cease to disturb our relationship as friends.

Trying to feel gratitude when one “ought to”—but does not—is even more difficult than trying to feel passionate when one is not in the mood.8

But losing friends seemed to be in the cards, money or not. In a burst of unpremeditated concern, Heinlein had offered places in their shelter to Andy Ahroon’s wife and three children. Andy himself was on active duty and would not need a shelter. Robert would give up his place in the shelter and take his chances fading into the bush, following the example of Mark Hubbard twenty years before. He had not consulted Ginny before making the offer—and she was not entirely certain she was up to taking care of a cripple (Lou Ahroon had an advanced case of multiple sclerosis) and the children, two boisterous boys and a girl who was at the rebellious stage.9 But she would back him up—even though it meant they would have to sleep in shifts.

Robert worked on getting in real beds—cots—and improving the sanitary facilities. He also laid in another gun and doubled their supply of batteries. Ginny had been collecting an entire shelf of survival skills books; she discovered that they had forgotten to plan for water and began distilling water and storing it in plastic jugs.10 When she was done, she had food and water to allow as many as six people to survive (in crowded discomfort) for one month.11 They instructed the kids how to get into the shelter and how to use all the equipment.

But late in November they had a “social spat” with Andy and Lou. “It was a silly business, just a broken date but some feelings were hurt on both sides.”12 Andy mailed back the key to the shelter. Robert sent it back with a note to the effect that they shouldn’t penalize the kids over a difference of opinion among the adults.

Yesterday he sent the key back to me for the second time, and made it quite plain that he would rather have his kids exposed unprotected to atomic attack than accept any favors from us.… It is a weird problem. We’ll deal with it as best we can.13

The details of the writing business continued to pile up and had to be dealt with. In December, Peter Israel wrote, after expressing satisfaction with Glory Road overall, that he, too, wanted to cut the “pointless” last hundred manuscript pages of the book.14 Ultimately Israel agreed to accept Heinlein’s “story sense” as controlling, and Putnam’s printed Glory Road as written—as did F&SF when Robert sent Avram Davidson, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, the edit he had prepared for Putnam’s.

Soon after the holidays, Ginny saw a specialist about her illness. Since her doctors said it was an inoperable kidney stone, Robert had been looking for other urologists and found that Dr. Howard, who had literally saved his life in 1934, was still practicing in Denver. Dr. Howard took a history and performed an endoscopic examination. Ginny did not have a kidney stone at all, he concluded—but when she was young, she had probably had a case of childhood tuberculosis (quite common in the 1920s) that left scars that might look, on an X-ray, like a kidney stone … if you weren’t particularly careful about what you were looking at. There were other problems—a calcified lymph gland that did show up on X-rays but her physicians had missed, an infected sphincter polyp, which he removed, and what looked like a lingering case of amebic dysentery—again. This time they both took the cure simultaneously, hoping to wipe it out completely.15

The amount and frequency of Demerol Ginny was taking dropped almost immediately.16 On January 23, 1963, Heinlein made a page of notes for a new book, Grand Slam (his family would be playing Bridge, with a seven No Trump contract when they took a direct nuclear hit that blasted them into the future). This book brought together two important topical subjects that had been on his mind since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October and November the last year:17 What he put into the book was an attitude that, in a very strong sense, the struggle for racial equality was the very emblem of the Western liberal values that would be the main victim of a nuclear war. The only thing a rational man could expect was that humanity would revert to its “normal” behavior throughout history. The inheritors of the Earth would think … differently: slavery at the very least—institutionalized cannibalism was not so unlikely. It had happened at various times and places in Earth’s long and unsavory history. He would thrust his “nuclear” family into a world that made their own “limousine liberal” racism a world-system, the chief administrator a mirror of his hero, with only the color values reversed. Leon Stover reported, more than twenty years later that Heinlein told him:

… it does no more than play on Mark Twain’s prophecy of 1885, that within a hundred years the formerly enslaved blacks of America would turn things around and “put whites underfoot,” unless racial attitudes were changed.18

Most of the material he drew from his own experience19—a scathing satire, with ironic inversions of all the standard justifications for racial bigotry. He raced through the book in twenty-five days, 126,000 words, retitled Farnham’s Freehold, presumably to throw the focus back where it ultimately belongs—in the individual action of the individual human being, where the future is made.

Ginny approved of Farnham’s Freehold. It was better, she said, than Glory Road. While polishing the manuscript before sending it to Blassingame, Heinlein took the opportunity to enlist a doctor’s help—Dr. Alan E. Nourse—to make the birth sequence as gut-wrenchingly believable as possible. Nourse suggested a long and difficult delivery, followed by hemorrhage and death by “bleeding out.”20 Heinlein was so appreciative that he eventually dedicated the book to Dr. Nourse.

In June, Heinlein again renewed his and Ginny’s membership in the American and Midwest Sunbathing Associations, though he hadn’t used them in years (all their nude sunbathing was done at home nowadays). Both Robert and Ginny continued their memberships for years, apparently on the principle that the right to be naked and not to be ruled by Mrs. Grundy deserves financial support from anyone who believes in freedom.

At any rate, he was getting extra sun, nowadays,21 unclogging silted-up catchbasins and improving their water-recovery system by running a siphon system directly from Ginny’s tub to the garden, to save the strain on her wrists carrying gray water during droughts.22 She was recovering that summer from wrist surgery for carpel tunnel syndrome. She was also back on Demerol more often than not, up from twice a week back in April.

Her local doctors had essentially given up on finding out what was the problem, simply renewing her prescriptions for Demerol, which bothered Heinlein: It was habit-forming. No good could come of this in the long run.23 But—

… a light gleam of light about Ginny’s health—she decided tonight [August 8, 1963] to try another approach … (Some of our friends have been telling me for months that I must make her do thus & so—haven’t they ever heard of the Emancipation Proclamation? Women are not chattels. Ginny does her own deciding.)24

To Bill Corson, he added:

She finally fired the joker who has not been treating her but loading her up with habit-forming drugs, and on Monday she goes into the hospital again, with new doctor, new tests, new hope for both of us. She hates it—she is not a patient patient—but this is a glimmer of light, maybe.25

Ginny probably had agreed to the change because she had taken up a new political cause, and the spasms of pain that came on at night interfered with her fund-raising activities for the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign. Heinlein approved of Goldwater, both personally and politically—a New Deal liberal who had evolved in a sensible way, responding to the actual political realities the country had found itself in after World War II.

Ginny was setting up a “Gold for Goldwater” fund-raising campaign with five other field workers—a grassroots organization, outside the somewhat hidebound local Republican hierarchy. “Spend what you think we can afford,” he told Ginny. He had been disillusioned with party politics for nearly a decade, but this was a campaign worth fighting.

One reason I hope he makes it (a personal, non-political reason) is that he is half Jewish. Since Ginny and I are half Jewish, too, it would please me personally to see a Jewboy make the big one … when I feel like kicking an anti-Semite in the teeth—an exercise I enjoy—I prefer to have it be a totally disinterested act, a blow for freedom).… 26

Heinlein was between books, but fan mail was becoming a real problem. “Ginny thinks I ought to stop answering reader mail entirely—but I can’t. I’m just not cold-blooded enough to ignore entirely a letter from a stranger in which he says that he enjoyed something I wrote.”27 Nor was mail the only interference with writing and the ongoing project of improving their water-recovery system. In addition to what sometimes seemed “hordes” each summer, of friends and relations coming through, an increasing number of strangers felt free to drop by unexpectedly. Working time was constantly being eaten up. “Da Capo” was not going to get written this year—or the 10,000-word story he was working up for Boys’ Life—or a novel, or all three.

Earlier in the spring, George Pal had looked at Podkayne for the screen, though he had not optioned the property. Now Heinlein’s Hollywood agent, Ned Brown, was contacted by someone at Screen Gems, a television production company. Heinlein had developed a strategy by this time for dealing with Hollywood types: He was not interested in spending his working hours stroking the vanity of any illiterate with a checkbook he might or might not see the inside of. He devised a simple acid test to sort the frivolous from the serious. Ginny Heinlein recalled:

… Hollywood producers would call frequently. Somehow they would obtain our unlisted telephone number if they were anxious enough to get in touch with Robert. They would talk about something, some project they would have in mind, and Robert would listen politely and then they would say “why don’t you come out here, hop a plane and come out here, and we’ll talk about it?” And Robert would say, “why don’t you hop a plane and come here to Colorado Springs, and we’ll talk about it.”28

That was usually the end of that.

The gambit failed, however, when the producer for Screen Gems, Howie Horwitz,29 agreed to fly out to Colorado Springs to continue the discussions for a new kind of science-fiction television series, representing also his writing partner, William Dozier. Horwitz was in Colorado Springs on September 5 and 6, 1963, and he turned out enthusiastic, knowledgeable about science fiction—and very persuasive. Screen Gems, Horwitz insisted, was looking for something completely different from any science fiction that had been on television so far—adult drama, not watered down at all, and “undiluted science fiction.” To make it possible, the interference was minimized by taking on multiple sponsors so that no one sponsor could control things. The Horwitz-Dozier team30 had two hit shows on at the same time: Route 66 (1960–64) and 77 Sunset Strip (1958–64). Screen Gems had given them a free hand to come up with their next big thing. The show was to be called Century XXII, since it was to be set in about 2160 AD. Furthermore, Horwitz and Dozier were the producers; there would not be any “Hollywood committee” sticking fingers in this particular pie.

The day after Horwitz left, Heinlein began working on Century XXII. His strong suit as an SF writer, he knew, was the “literature of ideas” end of SF. He decided to build the pilot script and the series proposal around “Gulf,” the strongest story ending he had ever thought up.31 The “Gulf” story would adapt nicely to the international spy thrillers that were popular at the time—Danger Man from the U.K., and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and I Spy. Kettle-Belly Baldwin, reworked to a younger, more vital character (Horwitz had Robert Stack in mind for a major role), was the core character, MacLeod. The series would go from crisis to crisis as MacLeod’s organization of superhumans guarded and guided humanity. The story of “Gulf,” with its tragic sacrifices of a comparative new recruit and one of MacLeod’s more experienced “children,” would be the pilot story, expanded to a ninety-minute format.

Ten days later, Heinlein had the series proposal ready—thirty-seven pages, plus a thirty-four-page appendix on the world of 2163 AD. He sent this, along with the first fifty pages of script for the pilot—“The Adventure of the Man Who Wasn’t There.”

FADE IN:

EXT. TITAN CITY SPACEPORT—NIGHT

1.   MINIATURE—SPACESHIP LANDING 1

A long, low-key shot of FIELD and SHIP, with SATURN conspicuous in B.G.

A high wind blows snow, sound of storm is an eerie ululation. The ship lands straight down, guided by pencils of light. We see by saturnlight and by floods which cover the snowy field; spot lights let us see what we wish to see. As the ship lands it partly obscures Saturn. CAMERA CLOSES IN as the ship lands. Ship extrudes jacks which steady it, cargo ports open, cargo skids float up to them. The ship starts discharging cargo as a long transparent tunnel snakes out from the largest dome, a dome surrounded by a control tower. A transparent ladder snakes down from the lower part of the great ship and locks onto the tunnel. A rumbling noise matches these movements. The ladder is an enclosed escalator, the tunnel from the dome is a moving walkway. A light at the control tower and one at the ship’s conn change from blinking to steady as linkup is made. Passengers in a crowded stream begin disembarking, animation to match use of escalator and slidewalk.

DISSOLVE TO:

2.   SPACEPORT FIELD               2

We look past the shoulders of THREE GROUND CREW in heavy protective clothing with helmets at the stream of passengers inside the slidewalk tunnel. CAMERA FASTENS on one man, MOVES with him. It is Professor NIKITA ZARKOV, a middle-aged, unworldly scholar, a sweet and friendly man. He is dressed in a 2163 mode, shorts, shoes, singlet, and pouch belt. He is smooth-shaven and his hair is very short. He is towing by a short lanyard a very large bag which floats—there is a small bulge at one end which is its antigrav unit.

As the CAMERA picks him out, he turns his head and looks at us.32

Six days later, he wrote “The End” to the script, at an overloaded 141 pages.33

209. RAISE FROM BLACK TO PICTURE AS MUSIC SWELLS

EXT. MINIATURE—FLAT LUNAR SURFACE, RINGWALL OF MOUNTAINS IN DISTANCE, BLACK SKY AND STARS ABOVE. IN MIDDLE FOREGROUND IS A MONUMENT, CONVENTIONAL.

Music starts as a dirge, shifts mood and becomes less mournful as we pull in toward monument. It quickly fills frame and the inscription on it then fills the frame so we can read it:

TO THE MEMORY OF

MR. AND MRS. ANDREW GENRO

WHO, NEAR THIS SPOT,

DIED FOR ALL THEIR FELLOW MEN

We hold on this for at least ten seconds.

As we raise the CAMERA from the monument to the starry sky MUSIC SWELLS in volume and becomes triumphantly exultant as it merges into THEME OF SERIES.

As quickly as stars alone fill the FRAME, we match with footage from the opening and start traveling fast through the stars. MUSIC UP AND OUT AS WE:

FADE TO BLACK

Horwitz and Dozier were having the contracts prepared, and he was going to have to go back to Hollywood to close the deal. He made the necessary final revisions on Farnham’s Freehold while he waited for the call.

He and Ginny had planned to go out for dinner on their anniversary, as usual, but they got the call to Hollywood for a meeting the day after, so they packed up and had their anniversary dinner in the air.

The meeting went well. They talked out the series proposal, and Heinlein “pitched” the rest of the pilot story. He had expected some resistance to killing off the episode second lead, but neither Horwitz nor Dozier raised any objections. When he got back home, he fiddled some with the pilot script and on Armistice Day sent the full script to Ned Brown. Brown discreetly let him know it was not filmable as it stood: Horwitz’s comments—“notes,” they are called in the industry—would give him the feedback he needed to rework the teleplay. But he had gotten the story down, and that was the main thing.

The same day Ned Brown’s comments were written (November 18, 1963), Robert and Ginny gave a dinner party for a number of people from the Navy League western regional meeting being held at the Broadmoor, including three of his Annapolis class—all admirals now—Ricketts, Brandley, and Loomis.34 At this party, Robert somehow got these dignitaries on their hands and knees on the living room floor, as ships re-enacting a famous Pacific naval battle while Robert read the progress of the battle to them.35

Ginny was more healthy and energetic—and quite suddenly. Just weeks before, she had been “so low that she had picked my next wife and was deciding to whom to give her jewelry.”36 Near the end of September, she had taken on a new doctor who had gotten her off Demerol with no residual effects at all. “… Ginny is well at last. Well, and suffering from a bad case of cabin fever; she went down and got herself a complete new set of flight baggage, so I am sure we will be starting out somewhere before long.”37 Heinlein had been working very hard on the television series. Popular Mechanics had proposed sending them to Antarctica for an article on Little America, but Ginny was talking about lying on the beaches of Tahiti, soaking up sun while he froze for the readers of PM.

The day after their dinner party was the last of the Navy League meeting, and Heinlein almost skipped it because of the late-night party. The keynote speaker was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Col. Ken BeLieu.38 BeLieu surprised everyone by ripping up his prepared speech and giving a rousing “go Navy!” talk that said all the things the admirals would like to have said but couldn’t. He was given a standing ovation.

In the receiving line afterwards, Col. BeLieu did a double-take when he heard Heinlein’s name. He hung on to Heinlein’s hand and blurted out, “The Green Hills of Earth!”—Heinlein told a friend about the incident, continuing: “and I sez, ‘Huh? You read the stuff?’—and he sez, ‘I’ve read everything you’ve ever published. I’ve been wanting to meet you for years.’”39 Robert and Ginny invited the colonel and his wife back to their place for drinks, and a passel of brass invited themselves along, so they had another wingding, second day in a row. The assistant secretary was indeed familiar with all of Heinlein’s writing—including the boys’ books most adults never saw. Flattering—downright flabbergasting when the Assistant Secretary of the Navy told him his favorite was Starship Troopers!

The boost to his morale stood him in good stead. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 23, 1963, and the national shock and grief filtered even into Colorado Springs. Heinlein kept working: Howie Horwitz visited on December 4, on his way to tour the Denver Mint, pleased with the project so far. Robert finalized the long-delayed revisions on Farnham’s Freehold and got the completed manuscript off to his typist a few days before Christmas.

On December 30, Horwitz sent him, not notes, but a completely revised script. His cover letter was not encouraging: He had fiddled with it a bit, he said, to improve the drama for television purposes—“though at some expense to dialogue.”40

This was the first indication that Heinlein and Horwitz were simply not talking the same language: Horwitz had not simply reworked the blocks of dialogue, he had completely gutted the story—and the worst of it was a new ending that fell flat, “killed the story.”41

Heinlein wrote to Horwitz of his—their—warm personal regard for him, hoping their friendship could survive anything that became of the series—but:

The new script does not merely have a handful of major faults which might be corrected by changing these few scenes either back to what they were, or by changing forward to something entirely different. This new script is bad all the way through, in endless ways. Characterization, motivation, and logical construction of plot have all been destroyed.…

Every time you get your hands on his dialog you turn him from a superman into a schnook.… since I can’t look inside your head, I’m not sure just what your “Kenro” is like—but from the external evidence of the dialog and actions in your script he seems to be a muscly young man, with quick reflexes, fairly slow mental processes, and difficulty in making up his mind about anything.

But the worst thing you have done to the Kenro character in this scene is to divest him of any nobility.… he flunks the superman test.…

I am saying that intelligence without compassion is the most viciously dangerous thing in the world—and that is the moral of this story and should be the moral, one way or another, of every story in the series. This is spelled out in my original presentation for the series; apparently you have forgotten it since now all you seem to want is an adventure story with exotic locale and characters.42

And the new ending was flatly unacceptable: The whole story had been conceived around the original ending, in which Kenro and Edith sacrifice themselves to save humankind. Without it, you had only disarticulated shards of story elements, people moving around without consistent psychological motivation.

Within a day or two, Heinlein learned that William Dozier had resigned from Screen Gems.

Horwitz—and Ned Brown—must have looked at Heinlein’s letter with a sinking feeling. Heinlein just didn’t seem to understand anything about television. All his story criticisms were perfectly valid, Horwitz told him, but the practical realities of making television in 1964 simply could not accommodate many of them.43

In retrospect, Robert Heinlein was absolutely the wrong person to approach for this kind of a project. Isolated in the mountains of Colorado, he had hardly watched television at all, and had no internalized “sense” of the dramatic textures of a television show.

They might have been able to come up with something workable if they had taken up Heinlein’s suggestion in his first reply, to scrap the “Gulf” story entirely and make up a new one from scratch. “We have a group of undefined characters in search of a plot and some fairly juicy elements to play with in constructing one.”44 But Horwitz insisted the story was salvageable—so long as you chop up the action, remove the longish speeches that establish the characters’ deep motivation, get rid of the symbols that back up the plot line, and remove any trace of moral position from the conflicts.

Heinlein was skeptical: “A properly constructed plot is as tight as a syllogistic sequence,” he told his agent, Ned Brown. “If you change the premises, you change the result. This is what Howie has done—but he fails to see it.”45

I suppose a vaguely similar story could be written, using the same names for characters, most of the locales, and the futuristic stage dressing. But plot structure, motivation, characterization,—and of course dialog—would have to be changed throughout … and it won’t be written by me. If I am told to change the ending, I will change it, collect my blood money, take my name off it, and walk off. Howie approved my ending in December, reversed himself, then again reversed himself over the telephone a couple of weeks ago and again agreed to let my ending stand, now has reversed himself still another time and now insists on changing it. I’m sick of it.…

Ned, don’t even suggest to me that I go along with them on this point (other than as a trained seal, to complete a distasteful contract). Don’t. Or I’m likely to bite right to the bone.46

Heinlein contractually owed them one more script revision and was “willing to do any damn thing they ask me to do,” but “Suffice it to say I don’t think Shakespeare could have worked for Screen Gems—and I have grave doubts about my own ability to.”47

Heinlein drove with Ginny to Hollywood for a working meeting with Horwitz scheduled for Monday, January 27, to be followed by an extended stay—as long as it would take to complete the obligation. While there, they renewed some old acquaintances, both long-standing friends in the Hollywood area and new ones met at recent fan conventions.

Heinlein completed his basic contract, delivering the revised script just before midnight on Valentine’s Day—Friday that year—but the script was still not satisfactory. Heinlein continued working sixteen-hour days on a third revised script which he turned in on February 27.

Ginny’s health had improved greatly, but her right knee was acting up. That was the deciding factor: It was time to go home. Two weeks later, Horwitz had not asked for a further revision. The contract was judged fulfilled, and they left for home on March 18.

He still had a career in print: While he was battening down with that last script revision, Fred Pohl had picked up Farnham’s Freehold for If magazine. If had started out as a sister magazine of Galaxy; by dint of hard work and exceptional editorial skill, Pohl was turning If into a real contender, and a steady market.

Heinlein was reluctant to start a new book, since he might have to be back in Hollywood that summer for pre-production work on Century XXII—and Jack Williamson was coming out for a visit at the end of May 1964 for his graduation from the doctoral program at Boulder, so they would have a visitor to entertain. Heinlein began to catch up on his backlog of technical reading and plowed into the mail that had accumulated in their absence.

The process of answering fan mail became so time-consuming that he instituted a postcard-only policy. Heinlein worked out a division-of-labor deal, with Ginny taking over most of the routine correspondence.

One correspondent wrote to give them a heads-up that Stranger in a Strange Land was starting to take on some unusual significance: At a recent seminar given by Alan Watts (America’s Zen expert), Watts had mentioned Stranger and gotten knowing nods from the audience.48 The April 1 royalty statements came in from Putnam’s, for the second half of 1963: Stranger’s sales were respectable, but they didn’t give any particular evidence of activity picking up—probably about twenty-five hundred sales of paperback and hardcover, combined, for the last six months—up from the November low last year of about six hundred.49

The Screen Gems deal was still technically alive, but Screen Gems was undergoing a major reorganization, Ned Brown told him, and had been managed by a committee for a time. Now the new director, former child star Jackie Cooper, was coming in like a new broom, with his own cadre of management. Howie Horwitz no longer had an office there: He was working out of his home. The Century XXII project was in limbo.50 Development hell. Heinlein had his Hollywood agent invoice Screen Gems for expenses and per diem on the trip.

And the science-fiction universe demanded his attention again: Glory Road was nominated for the Hugo Award. Even if the screenwriting venture was not successful, his writing was.

The universe was apparently intent on driving the lesson home: He received a partial reimbursement of expenses from Charles Fries at Screen Gems, along with a very nasty letter accusing him of dishonesty as to the rest. Robert politely acknowledged the check but pointed out the grounds for casting doubt on his honesty were not at all accurate (to say nothing of personally insulting). He might have stood still for the chiseling, he told Ned Brown: “A man can cheat me (and several have) and I will hardly blink. But if he cheats me and at the same time accuses me of cheating him—then I take any and all action open to me.”51 Two weeks later, Fries sent him the remainder of the expenses he had claimed.

Heinlein’s long-standing proposal for an omnibus volume of the Future History stories got a boost when Truman Talley at NAL offered to pick up the entire series if Robert finished the fifth projected book. Since that book was substantially done with the British and American publications of Orphans of the Sky (1962), the omnibus project was on track. A glitch had emerged in December, over the 1958 Gnome Press issue of Methuselah’s Children. By March 1963, it was back on the table: Doubleday had reconciled themselves to a seven-hundred-page volume, but Blassingame entertained suspicions: Already Doubleday had established a history of dumping its trade editions—giving them no substantial promotion—so they could issue in the cheaper and much more profitable SF Book Club (with a reduced author royalty).52 Earlier in 1964, Blassingame had negotiated a contract with Doubleday to bring out a Future History omnibus. The contract was prepared, and Willy Ley asked to write the introduction,53 but Heinlein rejected the contract as unsatisfactory54 and outlined the minimum conditions—“two nonnegotiable points, five subject to discussion”—he would accept in such a contract (among the latter: whether the books were to be issued separately again, or only in the large, omnibus format).55 When Doubleday wanted to take over the paperback rights for the original volumes, Blassingame, on Heinlein’s direct instructions, pulled the plug on those negotiations and reapproached Putnam’s, who had both Orphans in the Sky and Farnham’s Freehold in process.

Putnam’s was ramping up to market Farnham’s Freehold with scare tactics, and in the process the jacket blurbs tipped too much of the suspense factor in the book—while ignoring the important secondary themes:

… survival under very adverse and widely varying circumstances and the ever-changing problems of right conduct on the part of a free individual when faced with conflicts involving the equal rights of other individuals—problems involving the nature of democracy, the relationship between responsibility and authority, conflicts and tensions involving rate, sex, marital duty, miscegenation, family vs. outsiders, many others—and all of them based on the assumption that a man possesses free will and a never-ending duty to himself to behave always with full and impartial justice to everyone no matter how difficult the circumstances.…56

To a correspondent, Heinlein confided: “Glory Road and Farnham’s Freehold are possibly the least ‘escapist’ (along with Stranger) of any of my stories and the three together are a trilogy. But all three of them are heavily allegorical—and I’m damned if I’ll explain the allegories!”57

But by that time, he had received another kind of wake-up call. It had started early in June 1964, with what could only be termed a “routine” alarum-and-excursion (for a political campaign) at the downtown Gold for Goldwater headquarters—alarming for Ginny. William Scranton, the governor of Pennsylvania, was tossing his hat into the ring for the Republican nomination, which was splitting the Goldwater candidacy: It was, in fact, a “stop-Goldwater” movement. Governor Love of Colorado was going to defect—jumping on the Scranton bandwagon before the groundswell of support he expected—and the entire Colorado Goldwater organization might fall apart.58

Goldwater had already lost the active support of former President Eisenhower when the subject of the president’s younger brother, Milton S. Eisenhower, running for the presidency this year was broached to him. “One Eisenhower a generation is enough,” he had said. And that was that. Ginny was an experienced field worker—but this was entirely outside her experience. She asked Robert for help.